Water, so abundant, so
essential for life, has become the marketing success story of the century.
Specifically, bottled water sales now top $ 100 billion annually, making water
the world's fastest growing beverage industry. Clearly, we are no longer the
Pepsi generation.

And while the rich get richer
selling designer water to consumers who clearly have more cents than sense, the
UN reports that 1.1 billion people don't have access to any safe drinking
water. The UN report, compiled for the Fourth World Water Forum being held this
week in Mexico City, states that the death of 1.6 million people could be
prevented if they had safe drinking water and sanitation. The UN's Millennium
Development Goal of halving the number of people without clean water by 2015
has a price tag of $ 15 billion, a fraction of what we spend on bottled water.

This is perhaps the most
dramatic example of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots on this
sorry planet, and begs the question, "What the heck are we thinking?"

Clearly, thought has little
to do with it. The majority of people who consume bottled water also have
access to clean tap water. The only really difference between the water that
pours from the faucet and bottled water is the cost. The Earth Policy Institute
estimates that bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more than municipal
tap water. And while we rant and rave if gas prices go above the $ 1.00 per
litre mark, most of us routinely pay twice that amount for half as much water.

If price isn't a big enough
deterrent, then perhaps the environmental costs should be. Where tap water is
delivered efficiently without any unwanted packaging to be disposed of, the
distribution of bottled water is both costly and elaborate. In many cases,
water is bottled and shipped halfway around the world from places with such
exotic names as Perrier and Evian. Having been to Evian, I can attest that it
isn't anything magical. Evian is just a small French town on the south side of
Lake Geneva and Evian water tastes remarkably like the generic club soda that
can be purchased in bulk from the local grocery store. And while we're busy
buying up water from Europe, Canadian bottled water is being shipped elsewhere
around the globe.

In addition to the large
amount of fossil fuels that is consumed shipping water around the world,
there's the little problem of the bottles that contain that water, most of
which are made from polyethylene terephthalate (or PET), a plastic made from
crude oil. According to Emily Arnold, a researcher with the Earth Policy
Institute, this translates into 1.5 million barrels of oil annually in the US
alone, or enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. On a global scale, we use 2.7
million tons of plastic just to bottle water, very little of which is ever
re-captured through recycling programs. The remaining bottles are tossed into
our landfills where they can take up to 1,000 years to break down. Seems like a
ridiculous waste of a finite resource for a simple drink of water.

And there's more. A recent
study by Dr. William Shotyk, a Canadian-born researcher, has found that
antimony, a chemical used to make PET bottles, leaches into the drinking water
that they contain. The longer the water sits, the higher the concentration of antimony.
Small exposures to antimony can cause depression and illness, while larger
quantities can induce violent vomiting and even cause death. While ground water
contains approximately 2 parts per trillion (ppt) of antimony, freshly bottled
water averages 160 ppt. Samples left up to six months had levels as high as 630
ppt. While these levels fall below international standard of 6 parts per
billion, they do beg the question, "Why bother risking it in the first
place?"

Dr. Shotyk's study, which
will be published later this month in the Royal Society of Chemistry's journal,
is just the latest example of exactly how high a price we are willing to pay
for the convenience of bottled water.

So let's re-cap: $ 100
billion industry based exclusively on a commodity that is readily and (almost)
freely available from the tap while millions die without; millions of wasted
barrels of finite fuel oil; millions more tonnes of unrecycled wastes and toxic
chemicals to boot. This is an extreme example of exactly how far out of balance
our world has become.